Preps: Advocates taking action as fight for indoor sports ramps up

It’s been about two weeks since groups of coaches and parents successfully advocated for the return of prep football and other outdoor sports in the state of California. Now, a similar fight for indoor sports like basketball, volleyball and wrestling is being waged.

Basketball and wrestling remained in the least restrictive yellow tier when the state updated its guidance on Feb. 19. Volleyball actually got pushed back from orange to yellow.

The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) announced on Feb. 2 that it was abolishing tiers from its coronavirus guidelines, saying “We have increasingly recognized that transmission depends upon multiple factors that cannot be easily accounted for by simply dividing sports into three distinct categories of risk” in a news release. California has yet to follow suit.

While Marin’s daily adjusted case rate numbers have been dropping, the requirement to enter and remain in the yellow tier is less than one new case per 100,000 people. Marin has an estimated population of about 257,000, meaning two new cases in the county per day is the target number.

Marin has been averaging about 20 new cases per day over the past two weeks. Cutting that number by an additional 90 percent by April 19 — the latest possible start date to have a seven-week season that concludes by June 12 — seems unrealistic at best.

“I think the ultimate goal — for me personally and for everybody — is to open safely,” Marin Catholic boys basketball coach Mike Saia said. “We are acquiring numbers and data that shows that we have the potential to open safely. There are many communities that have been impacted by sadness and sickness and tragedy so no one wants to carelessly jump to the front just to say ‘Let’s play basketball, let’s play an indoor sport’ without taking all the necessary precautions all the health professionals are putting out there.”

Advocacy for indoor sports has taken many forms but the primary one has been lawsuits filed against various counties by San Diego lawyer Stephen C. Grebing. Similar lawsuits have been filed with students as plaintiffs in San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Alameda.

There’s talk of a lawsuit being filed in Marin.

A win outside of San Diego County would “make it legitimate,” Grebing told Bay Area basketball coaches during a zoom call on Monday.

“If I can get it done Friday, then the negotiation’s going to end,” Grebing said. “I don’t think they can take the risk of continuing to lose cases. If we get one win outside of San Diego, I think other counties are going to wake up.”

In the meantime, coaches and parents are hoping to show that their respective sports can be played safely. Tricia Lacy, whose daughter, Eva, plays on the Branson School volleyball team, started a petition to move volleyball back into the orange tier. As of Wednesday, the petition had more than 6,800 signatures.

“We’re not advocating for something that’s not safe,” Lacy said. “The girls can wear masks. It’s not a contact sport. In high school it’s just one team against another team with coaches and referees. Parents would love to be there but if we’re not allowed to be there so be it.”

Volleyball players, parents and coaches were left scratching their heads when their sport was pushed into the least restrictive tier without any rationale provided by the state. North Coast Section commissioner Pat Cruickshank said that the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) had immediately petitioned to move volleyball back into the orange tier but had yet to receive a response.

“That’s kind of where the frustration from a lot of families are coming from,” Branson girls volleyball coach Michelle Brazil said. “(Playing volleyball safely indoors) isn’t that hard to pull off. I know before the stay-at-home order was in place almost all the clubs were going and doing a good job with all the safety protocols. There’s really no reason that we can’t do that for high schools.”

Boys volleyball is in a unique position as the only sport potentially losing two full seasons to the pandemic. If this season also gets canceled, the seniors next year will have been freshmen the last time they took the court.

“If my program were to lose two consecutive seasons it would be devastating,” Redwood boys volleyball coach Tahan Minakov said. “You’re talking about juniors and seniors that help mentor and mold the freshmen and sophomores to be ready to play at a varsity level. Without that we would pretty much be starting from scratch.

“No boys volleyball team in the county has a JV program and if we lose the two seasons we could start losing interest and we could be in jeopardy of losing boys volleyball altogether.”

Wrestling and basketball both feature more contact than volleyball but coaches in both sports have pushed to be allowed to go outdoors if that’s what it takes to get a season started.

“There’s nothing that states we must be indoors,” Drake wrestling coach Johann Gerlach said “With the nature of a wrestling tournament, obviously you would be (indoors) but if we’re doing a dual-meet season, how is it impossible that we can do this (outdoors)?”

Gerlach has hosted a pair of outdoor dual meets at Drake in recent years but to this point there’s been no progress in the push to take wrestling outside.

Although wrestling is a high-contact sport, most matches last less than six minutes and wrestling is by nature cohort-friendly due to existing weight classes.

“We have a group of 20-ish kids,” Gerlach said. “They work in a cohort basically that is kids their own weight. There’s no instance of cross contaminating.”

Gerlach also points out that wrestling coaches have been well versed with hygiene and sanitization protocols due to the threat of ringworm.

“We’ve been doing this for years,” Gerlach said. “We have to wipe the mats down and do skin checks. Adding a temperature check and a COVID form that lists some of the protocols, this is nothing to us. I know we can do this.”